Esteban Cabeza de Baca – West of Federal Exhibition

Tuesday, February 6, 2024 – Friday, March 22, 2024

Philip J. Steele Gallery

Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. MT

RMCAD is honored to present Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s first solo exhibition in Colorado, West of Federal. With formative roots in Denver, the exhibition is a homecoming for the artist and brings together recent paintings that reveal how connected the artist remains to Colorado and the region while working in his Queens, New York studio. This blurring of locations and making connections across time echoes Cabeza de Baca’s paintings which act like time and space traveling devices, collapsing a location’s everchanging borders and its past, present, and future into a single picture plane.

The exhibition title, West of Federal, is a direct reference to the culturally significant Federal Boulevard, a vibrant west-side corridor of Denver with a long history of Mexican American residents, activism, language, food, culture, and art. Cabeza de Baca is heavily influenced by his Native American and Mexican heritage, the environmental and human rights advocacy of his parents, and landscapes significant to the artist’s life and family in the North American Southwest. Specifically, Cabeza de Baca draws inspiration from his childhood hometown of San Ysidro, CA bordering Tijuana, Mexico, the birthplace of his mother, his father’s original home of New Mexico, and Denver where Cabeza de Baca lived in the 1990s to early 2000s. Like Federal Boulevard, these places have been and continue to be shaped by Indigenous culture and people and the impacts of colonization and gentrification.